The document summarizes the history of computing hardware from early mechanical calculating devices to modern computers. It describes the progression from purely mechanical calculators operated by humans, to electromechanical computers with stored programs like Babbage's Analytical Engine, to early electronic computers using vacuum tubes like ENIAC. It then discusses the development of transistors, integrated circuits, microprocessors and personal computers in the post-1960s era.

1. History of computing hardware

2. Overview
• Mechanical tools to help humans with digital calculations were then called calculating
machines, by proprietary names, or even as they are now, calculators
• It was those humans who used the machines who were then called computers
• Calculators have continued to develop
• The first aids to computation were purely mechanical devices which required the operator to
set up the initial values of an elementary arithmetic operation, then manipulate the device to
obtain the result
• A sophisticated example is the slide rule in which numbers are represented as lengths on a
logarithmic scale and computation is performed by setting a cursor and aligning sliding scales,
thus adding those lengths

3. Earliest true hardware
• Devices have been used to aid computation for thousands of years, mostly using one-to-one
correspondence with our fingers
• These include the Antikythera mechanism and the astrolabe from ancient Greece
• Hero of Alexandria made many complex mechanical devices including automata and a
programmable cart

4. Earliest true hardware
• An abacus-like device used for multiplication and division
• The slide rule was invented in the 1620s to allow multiplication and division operations to be
carried out significantly faster than was previously possible
• Blaise Pascal started some pioneering work on calculating machines
• Leibniz said It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation
which could safely be relegated to anyone else if machines were used .
• Many subsequent designs were based on the decimal system

5. 1801: punched card technology
• Charles Babbage moved on from developing his difference
engine to a general purpose design, the Analytical Engine,
which drew directly on Jacquard's punched cards for its
program storage
• It was a general-purpose programmable computer,
employing punch cards for input and a steam engine for
power, using the positions of gears and shafts to represent
numbers
• This was a major problem
• The project dissolved in disputes with the artisan who built
parts and ended with the decision of the British Government
to cease funding

6. 1880s: punched card data storage
• The American Herman Hollerith invented data storage on a medium that could then be read by
a machine
• He settled on punched cards

7. Desktop calculators
• Lewis Fry Richardson's interest in weather prediction led
him to propose human computers and numerical analysis to
model the weather
• Future Nobel laureate Richard Feynman was the supervisor
of human computers who understood the use of differential
equations which were being solved for the war effort
• The first all-electronic desktop calculator was the British
ANITA Mk . VII
• Friden introduced the four-function EC-130

8. Advanced analog computers
• Analog computers had an advantage over early digital computers in that they could be used to
solve complex problems using behavioral analogs while the earliest attempts at digital
computers were quite limited
• Some of the most deployed analog computers included devices for aiming weapons, such as
the Norden bombsight, and fire-control systems, such as Arthur Pollen's Argo system for naval
vessels

9. Early electronic digital computation
• The era of modern computing began with a flurry of development before and during World War
II
• Machines such as the Z3, the Atanasoff Berry Computer, the Colossus computers, and the
ENIAC were built by hand using circuits containing relays or valves, and often used punched
cards or punched paper tape for input and as the main storage medium
• They have algorithm execution capability equivalent to a universal Turing machine

10. Zuse
• Konrad Zuse started construction in 1936 of his first Z-series calculators featuring memory and
programmability
• Zuse's purely mechanical, but already binary Z1, finished in 1938, worked reliably due to
problems with the precision of parts

11. Colossus
• The British at Bletchley Park achieved a number of successes at breaking encrypted German
military communications
• The bombe, designed by Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman, after the Polish cryptographic
bomba by Marian Rejewski, came into productive use in 1941
• The Lorenz SZ 40/42 machine was used for high-level Army communications, termed Tunny
by the British

12. American developments
• Shannon's thesis founded practical digital circuit design
• Stibitz was able to send the Complex Number Calculator remote commands over telephone
lines by a teletype
• Some participants in the conference who witnessed the demonstration were John von
Neumann, John Mauchly, and Norbert Wiener

13. ENIAC
• The US-built ENIAC was the first electronic general-purpose computer
• It combined, for the first time, the high speed of electronics with the ability to be programmed
for many complex problems
• ENIAC's development and construction lasted from 1943 to full operation at the end of 1945
• One of the major engineering feats was to minimize tube burnout

14. First-generation machines
• The first working von Neumann machine was the Manchester Baby or Small-Scale
Experimental Machine, developed by Frederic C. Williams and Tom Kilburn at the University of
Manchester in 1948 as a test bed for the Williams tube
• It was also capable of tackling real problems
• EDSAC was actually inspired by plans for EDVAC, the successor to ENIAC

15. Commercial computers
• The first commercial computer was the Ferranti Mark 1
• The main improvements over the Manchester Mark 1 were
in the size of the primary storage, secondary storage, a
faster multiplier, and additional instructions
• A second machine was purchased by the University of
Toronto
• The directors of J. Lyons Company, a British catering
company famous for its teashops but with strong interests in
new office management techniques, decided to take an
active role in promoting the commercial development of
computers

16. Commercial computers
• The UNIVAC I was delivered to the U.S. Census Bureau
• IBM announced the IBM 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine, the first in its successful
700/7000 series and its first IBM mainframe computer
• Efficient execution using drum memory was provided by a combination of hardware
architecture
• It was widely used in the CPUs and floating-point units of mainframe and other computers,
such as the Manchester Atlas and the IBM 360 series
• IBM introduced its first magnetic disk system, RAMAC in 1956

17. Second generation: transistors
• Problems with the reliability of early batches of point contact and alloyed junction transistors
meant that the machine's mean time between failures was about 90inutes
• Transistorized computers could contain tens of thousands of binary logic circuits in a relatively
compact space
• Transistorized electronics improved not only the CPU, but also the peripheral devices

18. Post-1960: third generation and
beyond
• The explosion in the use of computers began with third-generation computers, making use of
Jack St. Clair Kilby's and Robert Noyce's independent invention of the integrated circuit
• It is largely undisputed that the first single-chip microprocessor was the Intel 4004, designed
and realized by Ted Hoff, Federico Faggin, and Stanley Mazor at Intel

19. Post-1960: third generation and
beyond
• It became possible to simulate analog circuits with the simulation program with integrated
circuit emphasis, or SPICE on minicomputers, one of the programs for electronic design
automation
• In April 1975 at the Hannover Fair, was presented the P6060 produced by Olivetti, the world's
first personal computer with built-in floppy disk: Central Unit on two plates, code names PUCE1/
PUCE2, TTL components made, 8 single or double floppy disk driver, 32 alphanumeric
characters plasma display, 80 columns graphical thermal printer, 48 Kbytes of RAM, BASIC
language, 40 kilograms of weight
• MOS Technology KIM-1 and Altair 8800 were sold as kits for do-it-yourselfers
• Systems as complicated as computers require very high reliability
• Others read John von Neumann's First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, and immediately
started implementing their own systems

20. Thanks!